He is a man without a country, a family and a home. For more than a decade, Merhan Nasseri has been living in terminal one at Charles de Gaulle airport, waiting. For what, he doesn't know anymore

Manchester and London were delayed on account of weather, and Tel Aviv was a faulty wing flap. Tenerife, Johannesburg, Málaga and Marrakech had been canceled for various reasons, and stragglers from those flights were trying to figure out their next move on this humid night at the end of May. Some were arguing with the airlines; some were studying the ever shuffling flight board; some were headed off to nearby hotels, parched and ready for cold gin-and-tonics to ease the dull throb of their long day. A few scanned the terminal mournfully, searching for the right bench or piece of floor to camp for the night. Later it would make a good story: the purgatorial night spent in Terminal One at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Meanwhile, the flight to Libreville, which was to leave in two hours, had brought a raucous horde to the Air Gabon counter, the women dressed in colorful gowns, a cacophony of clipped tribal dialects punching holes in the fabric of the terminal's white noise. The group, maybe 200 in all, had materialized suddenly, as if by incantation, and would just as quickly vanish in the night, in the silver gut of a 747 roaring southward over desert and veld for home. Like everyone in this place, they were apparitions, part of the incessant tide that rushed, then ebbed, that filled and emptied, filled and emptied—at moments leaving the airport a lonely beachhead, one that bore no trace of those who had just been there.

As the hour grew late, the terminal took on a nocturnal malevolence. To be inside this place was not unlike being inside the belly of a dying thing. Upon its completion in 1974, Terminal One had been hailed as a triumph, an architectural breakthrough built by Paul Andreu, who had proclaimed that he wanted the airport "to project the image of Paris and France as one of equality, and prowess in engineering and commerce." It appeared as a gray doughnut-shaped flying saucer—outer space brought to earth—with a burbling fountain at its open-air center. But over the years the fountain had fallen into disrepair and the water was shut off, revealing, behind its vapory skeins, a wreckage of rusted pipes and a cement shed, the inevitable artifacts of the future disintegrating, then becoming the past.

The whole world passed through this place, on the way to Paris, or from Paris, or simply using Paris to leapfrog to the next time zone. Disembodied voices called passengers to their gates, where they were delivered heavenward. Soccer teams and school bands tromped through, as did groups of old people wearing the same T-shirts or church groups wearing the same baseball caps. They sat reading or photographing each other. They went for coffee or hamburgers. They wheeled by in wheelchairs. And then they were gone.

The longer you hung around in Terminal One, the more mundane everything became. Had a herd of red on been unloaded from Jerba and wandered out of customs, it would not have been such a surprise. Had a planeload of mimes come from Nuremberg, they would have registered only as part of the passing circus, hardly remembered afterward. In this context, a great deal made more sense here than elsewhere, including perhaps Sir Alfred.

A friend told me about Alfred a few years ago, having heard of him on the Internet. Initially, she believed him to be a work of fiction: the man who had waited at Charles de Gaulle Airport for fifteen years, on the longest layover in history. But then, the man was real. It was said he could be found near the Paris Bye Bye bar. He'd be bald on top, with frizzes of wild hair on the sides and four teeth missing, smoking a gold pipe, writing in his journal or listening to the radio. It was said, too, that it really didn't matter what time of day or night or which day of the week one visited, for Alfred was always there—and had been since 1988.

The truth was that no one knew the whole truth about Alfred, not even Alfred himself. He was born in either 1945 or 1947 or 1953 and claimed to be Iranian, British or Swedish. In some ways, it was as if he'd been found in the bulrushes—or was still lost there. For years now, he'd lived mostly on the kindness of strangers, eating his meals at a nearby McDonald's, wandering the terminal's white-tile floor as if it were his own cathedral. Mostly, he passed time on the terminal's first level, in gurulike meditation, on a red bench before a big, filmy plate-glass window near a shop selling CDs. He sat in a tight envelope of air that smelled faintly of regurgitation.

Alfred's odyssey had begun when he was a young man from a well-to-do family living in Iran and had ended here on an airport bench in Paris, by mistake. Twenty years ago, while living in Belgium, he'd simply wanted to go to England by boat. But having rid himself of his identification papers during the voyage, he'd fallen into a twilight limbo as a nationless, unidentifiable person no one wanted, bounced from Belgium to England to France, where, finally, he'd been left stranded at Charles de Gaulle Airport. He'd lived there ever since.

My first visit to Alfred came on the night of the Air Gabon flight to Libreville. I was staying for a time in Paris during a two-month stretch of intense travel. Adding it up, I'd spent nights in no less than fifteen different hotels, making me the frenetic opposite of Alfred. For me, the sheer speed of life had begun to strip it of its meaning. I imagined him to be some sort of mystic, sitting still on his Himalayan mountaintop, the keeper of monastic truths.

It was late, and the airport was empty and gave an air of exhaustion, of an animal too tired to resist the thing crawling up its leg. Going down a flight of stairs from the second level to the first, I nearly bowled over a young, tan flight attendant in a powder blue hat, who seemed in a hurry to get upstairs. After her, there was no one but Alfred.

If all the dramas of farewell and hello unfolded on the floors above, Level One was a kind of wasteland. What shops there were—a good number had closed in the past years—were shut up for the night. I walked quickly, following the circle of the terminal itself. Where the exterior of the building was gray cement, its doughnut-hole interior was all glass, so that you could look up and see three floors above you. On the second floor were the airline counters as well as six preliminary boarding gates that led to moving sidewalks, called electric tubes, that crisscrossed in the air, carrying travelers up through the open center of the terminal to the third floor, to more gates, called satellites, from which passengers disembarked for their flights. On the fourth level were the customs hall and arrival areas. I could see the electric tubes crisscrossing over my head, and in various windows all the way to the fourth floor, flashbulbs fired as travelers collected final photographic souvenirs of friends or family frozen in time.

And then there he was, laid out like a body in a sarcophagus, a snoring heap of human on a red bench, surrounded by a fortress of possessions. I counted several suitcases, six Lufthansa luggage bos, two big FedEx containers—his life's possessions. There were clothes hangers and a collection of plastic beverage lids. On the table before him was a pile of McDonald's coupons. He was gaunt and angular. His skin was the sallow, almost purplish color of the white fluorescent light, except for the dark rings under his closed eyes. His sideburns and mustache were graying. The nail of his left pinkie was long and sharp, but the rest were neatly clipped. And despite the heat, he slept in a blue Izod windbreaker beneath a light airline blanket, a gift, it appeared, from a sympathetic flight attendant.

I made a lap, returned, and he remained absolutely still. The third time, believing he was really out, lost in some Giza of a dream, I paused before him, and as soon as I did, his eyes flipped open. He bore no expression, but then his face twisted as if he were in great pain or perhaps about to lash out; and yet before he could, before some unholy utterance came from his body, his lids fluttered shut and he fell back to sleep—back, it seemed, to his own mysterious crater in an obliterated landscape.

Once upon a time, before facts were eroded by dreams, before the man destroyed and re-created himself, he had been a boy named Merhan Karimi Nasseri, happily living with five siblings in the oil-rich south of Iran. His father, a doctor, worked for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, while his mother assumed the duties of the household. By the standards of their country, they were rich and thriving in an area of Iran that was rich and thriving.

Merhan went to school, then college, where he took a psychology degree. But then, when he was 23, his father died of cancer. While he grieved, his mother notified him that she was not his real mother, that he was, in fact, the bastard son of an affair between his father and a Scottish woman, perhaps from Glasgow, who had worked as a nurse for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In order to protect her husband, who would have been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, she had pretended the boy was hers. Now, in one blow, she sought to undo a life of lies. She banished him from the family. Merhan was still only a young man, smart and able, with a promising future. He was a person in forward motion who, until that moment, had known exactly who he was and where he was going.

Merhan argued with his mother, claiming that she had to be his mother. Wrapped into this argument may have been his father's estate and the inheritance he felt was due him. Merhan threatened to take his mother to court, and her rebuttal was simple: With whose money? In the end, they worked out an agreement. Merhan would leave Iran to study abroad in England, where he would receive a monthly stipend.

In Bradford, England, he enrolled in a Yugoslav-studies program for three years, until one day, without warning, his stipend ceased. He tried to reach his family in Iran, calling and writing but receiving no answer. After some months, he flew to Tehran, where he was detained, arrested and imprisoned. He was informed that Iranian agents in England had photographed him marching in a protest against the Shah, which made him a traitor. It was the first of what would be three prison stays.

When his mother, now not his mother, found out about his incarceration, she paid the proper bribes to the proper authorities to secure his release, but again with a stipulation: He would be given an immigration passport, allowing him to leave Iran, never to return. Which is just what he did. Though he needed another country that would receive him, one that would grant him refugee status, his eventual plan was to travel to Glasgow in hopes of finding his supposed birth mother, who he believed lived there under some variation of the name Simon.

So he left. It's not known or remembered what ran through his mind as he boarded the plane that took him from Tehran to London, leaving his homeland and family behind. It's impossible to know if he'd been struck so hard by these events that he'd already lapsed into amnesia, if he felt betrayed and reeling in space.

Over the next several years, starting with England, Merhan appealed to at least seven countries for asylum, until Belgium granted him refugee status in October 1981. He settled in Brussels, working in a library, studying, receiving social aid. After saving some money, he approached the British Consulate to make sure he could visit Glasgow with his papers and was told there would be no problem. He purchased a ticket to England by boat, and once aboard, believing that he now occupied British soil because he was standing on the deck of a British ship, he placed his papers in an envelope and in a mailbox on board the ship, dispensing with them, sending them back to the Brussels office for the UN High Commission of Refugees.

This, of course, was an act of self-perdition that can't be explained and that immediately became the genesis of Merhan's woes. When he arrived in England and could show no papers proving his identity, he was sent back to Belgium, where, in turn, he was returned to England. To be rid of him once and for all, and playing a game of trans-national hot potato with his fate, England then randomly sent him by boat to Boulogne, France, where he was arrested and sentenced and served four months in prison for trying to enter the country illegally. After his release, he was given eighty-four hours to leave France and went to Charles de Gaulle Airport to see if by flying to England he might have better luck.

He didn't. Arriving in London, he was detained and returned to France, where, out of money and ideas, he settled into life at Terminal One. At first, he was simply one of those stranded travelers, waylaid for a night on his way elsewhere—then another night, and another. Since it was his belief that buying another ticket was the fine line between being a prisoner and a free man, he began asking fellow travelers for assistance. After two years, he again went up the electric tube to the satellite, again he boarded the plane, again he landed in London, and again he was expelled.

Returning to Charles de Gaulle, he was arrested once more for illegally entering the country and sentenced to six months in prison. After his release in 1988, he returned to Terminal One, perhaps out of sheer habit, packed and ready but with nowhere to go.

So much had happened since his arrival, if not to him then to the world at large. Reagan, Thatcher and Mitterand had given way to Bush II, Blair and Chirac. Communism had fallen; Rabin assassinated, Manhattan attacked. As the years passed—through war and famine, AIDS and SARS—he sat near the Paris Bye Bye bar, gleaning bits from the radio, occasionally watching the television set that hung in one of the restaurants. He renamed himself Sir Alfred. He was motherless, fatherless, homeless, moneyless, sitting still in a place where humanity moved frantically. Alongside a river of tinkling cell phones and half-drunk coffees hastily disposed of, he chose to live his life—most of which was packed into Lufthansa bos. He now insisted that he'd been born in Sweden and renounced all connections to Iran. He refused to speak Farsi. He refused to answer to his original name at all, even when his freedom was at stake.

For seven years, Alfred's lawyer, a bearded public advocate named Christian Bourguet, tried tracking down Alfred's identification papers in Brussels, the ones Alfred had mailed from the boat. Once he had those in hand, he, in turn, was able to procure from the French government a visa and a titre de voyage, a kind of passport that would have finally allowed Alfred to go to England. But when Alfred saw that the documents were issued for the Iranian national Merhan Karimi Nasseri, he became churlish, refusing to sign.

"Belong to someone else," he said in his Farsi-accented English, and so sealed his fate. On the temporary identification papers he held, both parents were simply marked by an X.

"I am an X, too," he said.

After watching him sleep, I went to see Alfred again the following day, about midmorning. The sun beamed in bright forms through the windows that looked out on the wrecked fountain and lit the shadowy corners. The first level was bustling with Monday travelers and, for a moment, seemed much less sinister, much more like your standard sterile airport, with bodies ebbing and flowing in streams past Alfred's table or up the electric tubes to the satellites. For his part, Alfred was pleased to have a visitor, probably would have been pleased to meet anyone who stepped out of the moving crowd long enough to say hello. He cleared a small table in front of him and commandeered a nearby chair. For a man who'd made a life of sitting still, he looked relatively fit, with strong-seeming arms.

When he spoke, however, his voice was weak, and he claimed he hadn't uttered a word in two months. Mumbling more to himself than to me, his words swam three-quarters of the way across the table, then back again. Occasionally, a cluster reached my ear. Everything he said cloverleafed back into his "case," though it was nearly impossible to determine what that case was—after all, his lawyer had solved his immediate dilemma by securing the papers that set him free. He vehemently claimed that Merhan Karimi Nasseri was free to go but that Sir Alfred wasn't. Soon I came to regard any mention of his "case" as shorthand for everything he had forgotten or chosen to forget, as code for a mysterious process of healing that called for the complete exorcism of the past.

He said he believed his real mother was still alive in Glasgow and that he would find her. "I hope not to be here by Christmas," he said with the pained smile and resignation of a man who'd most certainly be here by Christmas or who was simply talking about some Christmas in the far future, after a nuclear winter.

When I asked if, after fifteen years of this isolation, he felt he'd be lost in the world if he left the airport today, he said in his clipped English, "No, why? Same world." When I insisted that, if anything, these past fifteen years had in some ways drastically altered our daily existence—citing the rise of computers, cell phones and the nearly instantaneous changes in everything from food to fashion—he said, "Not worried."

After about a half hour of this kind of chat, his excitement began to peter out into that preordained moment, one that would repeat itself again and again, when, as I still sat across from him, he would simply raise a newspaper between us, like letting down a curtain, and begin reading. So this was good-bye? To let him gently off the hook, I announced that I was going to stretch my legs, and was answered by a single rustle of the paper. Then I walked a bit, figuring it probably didn't matter when I returned to him, as his sense of time must have been more like that of an animal who moves slowly, gauging the day by light and dark, or months by the weather.

On another evening, I asked how he'd spent his day, and he said he'd listened to the radio for five minutes and had brushed his teeth. That was all he'd managed in fourteen hours. He sat in a dull torpor, occasionally rubbing his head or working his jaw muscles, that blank stare taking in everything and nothing at once. Travelers streamed past, sometimes stealing a glance at him and his fortress. "People pass me by but don't touch," he said cryptically. When I asked what he'd learned about human nature here, in a place so transparently full of emotion, he said, "Everyone has their own function. They are mostly indifferent." When I pressed him about what function he served, he said, "I am sitting here, waiting."

At first I was intrigued by the mere logistics of a life spent waiting. No matter how little one accomplished in a day, Sir Alfred had accomplished less. His life rode no discernible narrative arc, and he had seemingly embraced the absurdity at the center of existence to the point where his sitting in place seemed like a political protest, seemed so meaningless it had to have meaning.

Yet Alfred had a few self-made purposes: waking, shaving, protecting his nest. He rose between six-thirty and eight in the morning. He would yawn, stretch and sometimes pull out a hand mirror, check himself and maybe shave with an electric razor, right there on his bench. He didn't limit himself to shaving in the morning, though. He shaved after lunch or before bed; he shaved in midconversation or while spooning a McDonald's sundae, a McFlurry, into his mouth or in midconversation.

He had his choice of two nearby bathrooms; he preferred the smaller and quieter of the two because it was closer to his bench and had a shower. Even though his belongings blocked the red bench from intruders—and he used a table and chair effectively to provide reinforcement—he still sometimes had to shoo people away, tired passengers looking to recline and, finding no comfort in the metal benches that had replaced the plush red ones three years before (all except Alfred's), mistakenly chose to brush aside his mess and sit or lie down, at which point Alfred appeared like an offended rooster, bristling and crowing and kicking up dust. "Okay, my place," he said. "Out now, thank you."

On occasion, there were other things that organized his waking hours. Someone had recently given him a carton of Thai cigarettes, for instance, and every day he gave me a progress report on how many he had smoked and how many were left. He said he normally smoked only a few a day, though a rough count over one afternoon suggested he smoked a few more than that. There were times when lighting up must have constituted his day's greatest ertion.

Sometimes he made a trip to the bank upstairs, where he had his savings account. While he was gone, a shopkeeper would guard his belongings, though a number of his bags were merely stuffed with newspapers, some with articles related to his case. Still, he'd recently lost a collection, most valuable to him, of Time magazines, so there was an ongoing need to be vigilant. Stung by the loss, he told me he now limited his wandering. Even though the first level of Terminal One didn't seem to have air-conditioning and though it was now sweltering, he hadn't stepped outdoors to get a breath of fresh air in a month.

"I dream sometimes of going through the window and reaching the sky," he said.

With an unimaginable amount of time on his hands—growing old, alone, and having to look only to himself for the answers to life's mysteries—Alfred created his own mythologies, a basic religious impulse. But Alfred's view of the world had more to do with how McDonald's had siphoned money from him when France converted from francs to euros in 2002, or how the French postal service conspired to no longer deliver mail to him from all over Europe—some of it containing money—sent by people who believed he was a symbol: of courage, of bureaucratic bungling, of soulless modern life swallowing us whole, of our human existential dilemma writ large.

When a noticeable growth appeared on his head a few years ago, he blamed it on "coffee and fake cola products." He showed me a photograph of his head from 1999 with the incontrovertible proof of a large, unsavory bump, "just there, jellifying," he said. The airport doctor, a short, busy man with bad teeth whose office was less than fifty yards from where Alfred sat, had watched it grow. Finally, he intervened, taking Alfred from the airport—one of the few times he'd ever left—to a nearby hospital, where the growth was removed. Yet in Alfred's retelling of the incident, he had performed the operation himself, in the bathroom, as a kind of medieval bloodletting.

In fact, the longer he sat there, the less Alfred seemed to remember, or the more fantasy merged with the few events of his life, casting out all other bit characters. Rejected by humanity, he now rejected humanity. The outside world was simply extraneous. His mind was panes of stained glass, rearranged in some self-satisfyingly inscrutable design.

When asked what he could recall of his boyhood in Iran, he could conjure only three distinct memories:

He had lived in a stone house.

He had been held down in a chair and stabbed repeatedly by actors in a theater, who had tired of him shouting out their lines when they forgot, though that had allegedly been his job.

He had nearly died in a car accident that never took place.

When pressed to fill in the details, he would only add, "A house like those in England" or "You have to ask them why they stab and stab" or "I jump and run."

When I asked to see his collection of photographs, thinking they might catalyze his memory, most turned out to be of inanimate objects in the terminal: the revolving door in a wild snowstorm; an abandoned suitcase the bomb squad had exploded, leaving confettied paper everywhere; a counter in one of the nearby shops that had been dusted for fingerprints after a break-in. The rest of the photos were of him, either standing solo, staring straight into the lens, or posing with various passersby, none of whom he seemed to remember.

When I pressed him to identify someone, anyone, that he spoke to in the airport, anyone with whom he had a human connection, he claimed to have known one of the employees at McDonald's for four years. When I asked his name, Alfred said, "I have no idea."

It's possible that the most religious moments occur in airports rather than in churches. This is not blasphemy but a fact of modern life. Apprehension, longing and the fear of complete disintegration—what palpably animates an airport full of passengers about to take to heaven at the speed of sound—is what drives us to our gods.

Over the course of a few weeks, I looked forward to seeing Alfred for perhaps no other reason than he seemed glad to see me too. In some ways, I came to see his dilemma as a question of faith. After so many betrayals, he feared the world beyond his red bench. The red bench was his hovel, home and haven—and yet occasionally he made the motions of wanting to break free. One day, for instance, I found him checking the classified ads in the paper, declaring that he was looking to buy a car. Perhaps it empowered him to say so, but it seemed impossible: Sir Alfred behind the wheel, on his way to Who-Knew-Where. As he squinted at the classifieds, I was struck by the poignancy of his circumstance, the strength—if delusion—of his hope, an abnormal man living out of time, attempting to take on the mantle of a normal life.

I asked if he was angry about having lost fifteen years of his life in this black hole at Terminal One. "No angry," he said. "I just want to know who my parents are." Are you happy, then? I asked. "I used to be," he said, "but now I'm stuck between heaven and hell." When I asked if he believed in God, he nodded his head as if he were drawing the letter U with his nose; that was neither yes nor no. "Believe in soul," he said. "Your soul is not separate from your function, but it is also more. Your soul is your dream, your dream life, your dream world, and it walks around with you, wherever you go."

Then he gestured to his kingdom of stuff, his bags packed with newspapers and magazines, with his meager clothing and pictures of exploded suitcases, with endless pages from his journals relating the day's radio news. "Nothing has changed for me except I have more baggage," he said. He leaned back and rubbed his head, where the bump had once been, with a kind of superstitious care. "But I'm prepared," he said. "Other people stay in this place for a couple of hours. They arrive and go to cars that are waiting, or buses. They come and go up the electric tubes to the satellites. When it's my turn, when I am called, I'm ready to go to the satellite."

Eventually, I paid a visit to his lawyer, Christian Bourguet. During the reign of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Bourguet had been Iran's lawyer, had been the man who arranged the ayatollah's Air France ticket from exile back to Tehran in 1979 and had secretly negotiated with the Carter administration for an end to the hostage crisis, an end he said should have come about nine months before it did. On the wall was evidence of Bourguet's work during that time: a couple of framed personal letters from Jimmy Carter.

He told me that, when he'd first met Alfred, the man had been quite lucid in the telling of his story, but that over time he had become "free of logic," and so his story kept changing. After Alfred suddenly asserted he was Swedish, Bourguet asked how he then had traveled from Sweden to Iran. "Submarine," Alfred said. Perhaps he was crazy now but, Bourguet argued, he'd arrived there by several steps. "Assume that you are 23," he said, working a piece of clay in his fingers while chomping on the stem of his pipe. "You've finished your studies in psychology, your father dies, and at that exact moment, your mother says, 'I'm not your mother.' You have brothers and sisters, but not anymore. And because you are illegitimate, you are a nobody in your country. You have no rights. And so you ask, 'Who is my mother, then?' You leave your country, only to return to be imprisoned, and then leave with nowhere to go, whereupon you are imprisoned again—and then once more.

"In your mind, you have renounced this person and this name that was formerly you, but when, years later, you go to get what you think is your freedom, the papers identify you as that person. How strong does a man have to be to resist so many big shocks?"

But then, I wondered aloud, why not simply sign the documents and afterward legally change his name? "Let me tell you something," said the lawyer, rocking back in his chair, a ball of flame from his lighter disappearing into a nest of newly packed tobacco. "He's not leaving the airport. He's no one outside the airport. He's become a star there. Or he feels like a star—and acts like one. If you come with a camera, he knows his best side. Otherwise, his personality has broken into pieces."

He sucked deeply on the pipe, placed the clay on his desk and looked up, shaking his head in pity. "I'm afraid the sad fact is that he's now completely destroyed."

The last time I went to see Alfred, it was evening, and a storm had blown over Paris, the wind moving the leaves like so many small fluttering wings, lights falling in slick, watery dabs over pavement, over the Seine itself. Cool air came rushing to replace the humid day, but when I entered the terminal, the ghost of that hot day was still trapped inside. I proceeded with my routine, making laps on the floors above before seeing Alfred. I stood for over an hour in arrivals near an expectant group waiting for a delayed flight from New York City. I meant to leave after five minutes, but with each passing second I found myself further embroiled in the small dramas of each party—the little girl with a sign that read you are home, papa; the three hippie amigos badly playing guitar and bongos to everyone's annoyance; the woman, so prettily dressed in white, who already couldn't hold back tears.

Later I found Alfred sitting on his red bench, shaving. Behind him, through the plate-glass window, lay the wreckage of rusted pipes, a reminder that at one time something spectacular had occurred out there. It was late and empty again. The white-tile floor seemed to sweat; the scent of regurgitation hung in the air; and here was my guru, my holy man, my ayatollah, opening and closing his mouth, ercising his jaw muscle. Then he started to speak. "I don't smoke for three days," he said somewhat bitterly. That was it. That was all he could muster.

If anything, with each day Alfred was becoming another inanimate object in this airport, devoid of memories. Soon, I imagined, he would forget the stone house or being stabbed or the car crash that had never taken place. He would forget that there'd ever been a guy at McDonald's whom he once remotely knew or maybe even the exact reason that he still sat here.

Shortly, his newspaper came up between us and rustled once. Good-bye. People washed past on their way upstairs for flights to Hamburg, Dublin, Oslo. Instead of leaving him entirely, I walked over to the bar, bought a beer and settled in a window a third of the way around the circle. I drank my beer and then another. From where I sat I could look up into the windows on each floor of Terminal One. I could see through twenty-four different windows, and in each of them, twenty-four different scenes played out: people saying good-bye, sobbing, laughing, lost in meditation, confused, in transit. To have heard their thoughts would have been to let loose all the joys and woes of the world.

Across the way, Alfred readied himself for bed, then lay down and, despite the heat, pulled his thin blanket over his body. After twenty minutes or so, he seemed as if he were in a dream: His legs rose up and his knees lightly bumped each other; then his legs went down again. He was someone out of an epic or a fairy tale, someone shipwrecked or lost or trapped forever in an unsolvable nightmare. And yet, stripped of everything, he was his own god.

Above, the electric tubes were lit brightly in the night, and from the vantage of the basement you could see the crowns of people's heads reflecting off the glass ceiling of the tubes as they were lifted toward the satellites. If you sat long enough, looking down on the crowns of their heads, you could have imagined yourself an angel. And it occurred to me that if you sat long enough thinking such dangerous thoughts, you might never leave, too.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014).The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.